The Girl From Wudang, PJ Caldas
Reading this book was not an easy feat for me. It is a novel touching on subject matter about which I have little knowledge, apart from the pain of migraine headaches, from which I suffer, and from which my twin brother suffered. Mine are classified as retinal migraines, but his were of the same nature as the main character’s, which are known as cluster migraines. The pain of these headaches is so unrelenting, they have been known to cause suicides.
The book’s author delves deeply into the fields of martial arts, artificial intelligence and concepts that transcend life, as we know it today. There have already been many experiments into the merging of these fields for technological, health care and military purposes, some of which the author footnotes in the book. As the author marries today’s advanced technology with yesterday’s well known martial arts techniques, she creates a book that also marries fact and fiction, making it not only a thriller, but an adventure that explores the world of science and science fiction, subjects currently very prevalent in the news today. Artificial Intelligence has been described as what could be a dangerous threat to life as we know it, by no less a personage as the famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, and has led others to wonder what Albert Einstein would have thought about it.
Claudia Yang, the main character, known alternately also as the Tigress and Yinyin, studied Tai Chi from early childhood. She believed that it was her destiny to become the greatest teacher of martial arts for women, thus empowering them to protect and defend themselves from the violence of evil men. She believed she would ultimately earn immortality. For this reason, she left China and moved to America to train women in her unique use of the art of self-defense. Claudia had a major problem, however, which interfered in her life at unexpected times. She suffered from a kind of disabling migraine headache that was uncontrollable, from which she sought relief, both physically and psychologically, by engaging in violent fighting. This caused a different kind of pain to herself, pain she believed she could control, pain she also inflicted upon others.
Meanwhile, in the world of scientists, investigations into the merging of the minds of human beings with each other and with programs utilizing artificial intelligence, were being conducted. The ultimate successful “being” created would have to be capable of outsmarting an “actual being” that was created by artificial intelligence. It was thought that the created artificial bot might one day wish to wipe out its original creators, and thus the human race. Could artificial intelligence bots be implanted in the human brain that would someday want to control that human brain for their own benefit? Could they be controlled once unleashed?
When Claudia appeared on the radar of scientists involved in these experiments, she was suspicious. They promised that they could rid her of her crippling headaches if she allowed them to implant bots into her brain. So great was her pain that she agreed. In return, however, she was supposed to teach them how to fight effectively to combat those beings created by artificial intelligence, in case they ever organized against humans. Merging their scientific minds with hers, to learn her fighting skills, would give them the needed advantage. Was that the real end goal of these scientists? Was the government involved? Had AI already escaped the laboratory?
I struggled through page after page, hoping I would understand more than I did. The story bounces around, and the timeline shifts. Sometimes the characters are not fully introduced or developed enough to comprehend their actions, but at the same time, the themes were so interesting that they kept me reading regardless of the effort involved. The footnotes provided by the author refer to many factual experiments in the world of AI. The science involved is very real. The martial arts themes are accurate. If someone takes the time to investigate the terms and the theories brought forth, they will learn a great deal, but it will require research to understand the book completely.
I found the main character to be a contrast in human qualities. On the one hand she was interested in helping women, but on the other her own moral standards seemed non-existent as she bounced from bed to bed, preoccupied with sex, when she wasn’t engaged in life threatening violent fighting. She was a study in contrasts as her base instincts seemed to rule her behavior. Perhaps the author wanted to show the difference in the passion that exists in a human vs a bot created by artificial intelligence, a being with only one purpose, that being to exist. The narrative raises the questions of whether or not AI has already escaped the laboratory and/or its subjects, and the question of which world is the real one, the one we are living in, or the one that artificial intelligence has already created for us.
A smarter person than I am, might be able to understand more of the book than I did, or perhaps a younger person, who is more familiar with the gaming industry, the martial arts world and the experiments in artificial intelligence development. Regardless of who it is that reads this book, I guarantee they will come away with questions they will want answered. The possibilities presented in this marriage of fact and fiction, are capable of becoming reality. That said, you don’t really have to understand every concept presented in the novel to be intrigued by the theme of robots and other technological anomalies overtaking humans in the world, ruling them instead of humans controlling the beings created by artificial intelligence.
The novel is written both intellectually and creatively, even though I won’t pretend to have understood a lot of the technical terms. I had to look up many of the words and had to work at trying to understand the information about the use of AI in our world, but the current scientific approach means that the joining of minds and bots is definitely a possibility, and is an idea currently being explored and exploited by our government and our military.
These are just a few of the words and terms I chose to look up, some of which I could not find a meaning:
Dao, Eclosion/ecloding, Hymenopterans, Anamnodome, Shifu, Wu Wei, GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks).
This was an ARC, so perhaps there will be a glossary in the final copy. I read to learn, so I have to say this was a real learning experience. I recommend it to those who want to learn.